09/01/2024
💧Part 3 of our Working with Water series.💧
Our previous post touched on movement and this is influenced by water height and speed.
Both water height and speed are manually controlled by the operator and tailored to each horse (making it quite important who operates the treadmill).
🏊♀️Water height:
🐴Greco-Otto et al. (2017) concluded that water height had greater effect on exercise intensity compared to speed.
🐴Comparatively to walking on a dry treadmill, the introduction of water has seen an increase in distal limb joint ROM (Mendez-Angulo et al., 2013), increased pelvic axial rotation (Mooij et al., 2013) and increased total range of back flexion-extension and lumbar flexion (Nankervis et al., 2016). The common trend is as water depth increases, stride length increases and stride frequency decreases.
🐴A survey by Tranquille et al., (2018) noted higher water heights are commonly seen within training and conditioning and lower heights within rehabilitation. However, individual horses ability to flex proximal joints or the lumbopelvic region, which may be due to pathology, conformation or soft tissue restriction, will affect how they respond to different water heights.
Therefore, protocols need to be designed based on the individual horse.
🏃♀️🏃Speed:
🐴Current research and practice have many variations on the preferred/optimum speed used whilst walking on the treadmill at varying depths of water.
🐴For a horse to walk at a comfortable pace on the UWTM, the addition of water can see speeds up to 50% slower than walking on land/dry (King, 2016).
If you have any questions or would like to know more, please do not hesitate to get in contact with us.
